jr conlin's ink stained banana

Last night i upgraded Ubutntu to 8.10, as part of that, i pulled down the latest KDE release to see if it was, indeed, bigger/stronger/faster/more lemony fresh/etc.

i haven't completely regretted that decision, but it's come close a few times.

First off, let me note that KDE4 is not ready for mass consumption, regardless of what the advocates say. If it were, i'd be able to find out how to use javascript to make widgets instead of finding this page. There's also lots of other design considerations that absolutely break the way that you have been using your desktop for the past 15 or so years. (No, really, steering with your feet and controlling the speed of the car with a wheel is far more efficient than what you've been doing before.) So here's what i've done and discovered to get the "Pretty" the hell out of the way and let me work.

1) Killing Kick-off
Do you focus on 1% of your field of vision? Do you crave little voyages of discovery? Well, then kick-off is for YOU! Taking a rather poor page from Vista and OSX, Kickoff presents an edited list of applications for you to choose from because we all only use two or three apps and remember where we put things months ago, right? Right click on the CircleK and pick "Switch to Traditional Style" to get back your muscle memories. One thing to note: That menu is the "Application Launcher Menu" widget. You'll need to know that when it disappears on you after KDE crashes.

2) You're Cleaned Desktop
KDE4 was designed by a neat freak. Someone who apparently doesn't own a physical desk and instead does all of his work in a sterile environment reminiscent of scenes from THX-1138. My desk is full of crap. It's loaded with stuff i use on a frequent basis like my phone, pens, documents, etc. Generally it's the stuff i need to do work. Likewise my virtual desktop is similarly cluttered with quick tools i need. i don't have to go dig for Firefox or Thunderbird or that PDF of API calls, they're right there on the desktop. Silly me.
KDE4 takes a firehose to such concepts and instead tosses all your "desktop" stuff into a translucent panel called "Desktop". Yay you. The good news is that you can drag application links back onto your virtual desktop and rebuild some of your life. Can't do that for documents or folders, sadly. Oh, and don't delete the original ".desktop" shortcut file since that's still used. You also might want to move the auto-download location for Mozilla since apparently efficiency is not clean.

3) Menubar mucking
See that little mini plasma icon on the right hand side of the menu bar? No, that's not for widgets like it's larger, immobile cousin lurking far above it, that button allows you to move and modify the bottom toolbar. Sadly, no way to make it transparent like in KDE4, so pick a theme you feel comfortable with.
The gray arrow is offset, the blue is suggested length (not always followed) and the green arrow, she does nothing.

Things i've yet to figure out how to fix:

1. You can't edit/remove "Favorites", but don't worry, they're not you're favorites.
2. i can't get KDE4 to recognize Pidgin as a valid default IM application (although it does let me specify thunderbird at least)
3. You can no longer display applications only on one desktop. The taskbar displays applications regardless of which desktop they've been assigned to. So much for keeping discrete sessions discrete.
4. Hot Plug USB connections no longer appear on the desktop. They appear in a widget window now. Neatness counts (apparently more than tradition or efficiency, but that's beside the point.)
5. i'm regularly able to crash KDE4 by opening the twitter widget. Since i'm not a huge fan of "widgets" vs "real apps that do things and not crash your window system" It's not a show stopper.

More info as it may or may not materialize.